#36 -- My Encounter With El arado

This is one of my Cotidianas that was published in July 2005. Because we’re saying goodbye to September, I want to remember Víctor and El arado and the people that go to work every day, without ever complaining about how hard it is. M.

As long as we sing his songs, as long as his courage can inspire us to greater courage, Víctor Jara will never die. – Pete Seeger

In my childhood home, the music was exclusively ranchera. From Lucha Villa to the duo Las Jilguerillas. In these songs women’s eyes were always black, they were proud and pretty and they made men beg. On their part, men found comfort in their tequila, they spoke about their horse, their guns and of that love they couldn’t reach.

In my childhood home, people were the salt of the earth; they are peasants with very little formal instruction. Their culture is hard work; they just do it and like to be noticed by the excellent way in which they execute it. Theirs is an attitude of never complaining and to feel pride about having work, no matter how hard, as long as it’s honest work, and of not having to go to anybody for assistance to satisfy their basic needs.

So, in my home there was music, cheerfulness and a lot of work. Everything was very humble, but nothing essential was amiss. My dad planted tomatoes and hot peppers in his backyard; inside, my mom’s plants blossomed and went green in almost hallucinating splendor. That was everyday life in my childhood.

When I was in high school, I recall a study circle (more like a book club) I attended in the Reforma sector of Guadalajara. Once a week a group of students would get together with the intent of reading and understanding philosophy classics. One day, before the discussion began, a boy, Enrique, took his guitar and started to sing. The song was definitely not ranchera, the ones that were played at my house but neither was it a modern or commercial song from the radio: it was not Julio Iglesias, Emmanuel, Juan Gabriel or Raphael. I had never heard this song. I was transfixed by its lyrics. The words were a revelation to me, I was deeply moved to listen how the song spoke about my people, with such sweetness and profound understanding.

The simple guitar strumming held the words up lofty and airy, those words that I felt were mine alone: I tighten my hold/ to plunge the plow in the soil./ I’ve been here so many years/ how can I not be tired?/ Butterflies fly, crickets sing,/ my skin gets black/ and the sun shines, shines, shines./ Sweat flows in rows/ like the rows I make on the earth/ nonstop.

This was the first Víctor Jara song I heard. Since then, Victor became part of all the icons, symbols and experiences that come together to shape my North: all that guides and defines me.

Víctor was born in Lonquén, Chile (less than 50 miles outside of Santiago) in September 1932 and was assassinated a few days before turning 41 in September 1973 in his country’s capital. Before dying he was tortured for several days; the military broke his hands so he couldn’t play the guitar again and then shot him to death with 44 bullets.

Víctor was a sympathizer of President Salvador Allende and when the coup d’état happened, among all the dead was Víctor.

Víctor lived his poverty with dignity and never forgot it. As a matter of fact, he dedicated his work to celebrate and ennoble the most humble laborers, the most humble people, the people whose sun-worn hands continue to hold our world with their everyday work.

#35 -- The Thing About Mary

So today I want to write about a delicate issue. Not for me because in my head and in my heart things are clear to me. But I know the topic can be touchy for most Catholics.

I want to talk about Mary.

This is my understanding. Mary was a virgin when God selected her to give birth to Jesus. She was engaged to Joseph who accepted to marry her because in a dream God spoke to him.

The virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus. After a bit more than three decades later, came the death of her son on the cross and then we had her assumption into heaven.

In my teenage and early adult years I was baffled by her life and Joseph’s. So I read the New Testament and found reference to Jesus’ brothers, so in my mind it was settled that Mary had children after she had Jesus, the Bible said so.

Then Catholics that know more than me put me in my place and insisted that Mary died a virgin and Christ was her only son. That she never had sex, which led me to believe that, yes, Margarita, sex is bad and Mary never did anything bad.

See, I have a hard time processing this. I believe that sex through love, commitment and responsibility is not only beautiful but smiled upon by our Creator. I don’t think he expected his favorite daughter, Mary, on to whose womb he trusted his son to acquire his human form, and her saintly fiancé, Joseph, to go through life without this deeply needed and deeply satisfying aspect of our humanity.

So I ask myself this, if Mary had sex with her husband, how did this diminish her role and her position in our Christian narrative? In my mind in no way whatsoever. I imagined she led a life obeying the precepts of her faith and that she dedicated it to God, her husband and her children. How could she be more saintly if she didn’t have sex (unless sex is really something bad to be avoided like the plague)? I just don’t know. And anyway, what business is it of ours to wonder and decide she had to die a virgin? I think that conclusion really drives the idea that sex is a taboo, something to hide and hold as a measure of ethic and moral value, instead of making sure we hold it as the wonderful thing it is and learn to approach it and practice it with reverence and responsibility. I think Mary and Joseph did that and that God smiled on that relationship.

This line of thought took me think about Jesus and all the controversy about him and Magdalene. If I accept he is the Son of God and our Redeemer, how would he having a relationship with this woman make him less divine? He still fulfilled his ministry and his destiny, pleasing his Father with the way in which he lived and died. And, ultimately I don’t care what he did in his private life. He still is who he is.

His divine nature remains untarnished in my heart and soul.

#34 -- Let me tell You About…My Books and my Movies

The last three books that have had me lost in my Nook are by Elizabeth Strout. I hadn’t heard about her before, but I read she won the Pulitzer in 2009 with her novel Olive Kitteridge. So I started with that one. She has two others, Amy and Isabelle and Abide With Me that I read immediately after.

Elizabeth is from new England, Maine to be precise. The term “New England” is one that awakens magical images in my mind, mostly of Mother Nature. I love the idea of the fall aflame in color, and the idea of long snowfalls and prolonged quiet, lonely walks bundled in winter wear. I know, most people that actually know the area say that winters can be miserable, but somehow I cannot associate the words New England with misery. Go figure.

Anyway, I read Strout’s three novels and I was captivated. She is a woman who takes her time with her characters and their lives. I read somewhere that she is a realist and I agree. She makes them real in their interactions and in the things that happen to them. Still more, what I find oddly perturbing but captivating at the same time
(because I can be a nosy body), is how intimately she portrays them. To be truthful, I sometimes felt that she had me in a room way too close to a character and that I was learning things that were too intimate and too private and that I didn’t have a right to be like the proverbial fly on the wall. When she deals with all the sordid details of excess or perversion, it’s with respect and objectivity, like she is saying, “Hey, I know, this is horrible, but it is part of our humanity and it explains this character better, so let’s deal with it and move on. No need for your judgment.”

Last week I went to the movies. I saw Higher Ground exquisitely acted and directed by Vera Farmiga (remember her from Up in the Air, as Clooney’s lover). The movie is a subdued but intense drama of one woman’s journey through her spiritual and religious life. Corinne is the main character who in her teen years becomes a radical and fundamental Christian along with her husband. She gives her youth and a good chunk of her adult years to her religious beliefs.

At some point, Corinne begins to struggle with her faith and you can see how she starts to feel unsettled by what she has held to be true in life: God and Christ. Her beliefs begin to crumble, as well as her marriage of many years, one that gave her three children.

The movie is based on the memoir This Dark World by Carolyn S. Briggs that now has been renamed Higher Ground: A Memoir of Salvation Found and Lost. So moved was I by the movie that I read this book in three days.

When I saw Corinne battling to hold on to her faith, I cried, I so identified myself with that odd feeling of emptiness and of uselessness when you feel you must release something that has anchored you to the world since you are aware of your existence. It took me to those first months when I began to define myself as an atheist.

After the movie and after reading the book I wrote in my journal: Dear Father, I am done doubting and questioning You. You are. Period. And I love You. No more atheism for me, even if I’m wrong, You are and I love You. Your daughter, Tita.

#33- Homesickness in Cardboard Boxes

When my mother, almost eighty, returns from Mexico, she usually arrives with a suitcase and two cardboard boxes. These boxes could very well have the logo of the Mexican detergent Ariel. She expertly ties these boxes with vinyl yellow rope, a typical sign that one must be Mexican (or maybe we could generalize and say Latin American).

I remember one particular trip. She arrived on a bus from Jiquilpan, a town near her native village in the state of Michoacan, to the Dallas suburb of Oak Cliff with a four-hour delay and swollen feet but, surprisingly, happy and strong.

After the vicissitudes that delays of this nature cause, we got home around midnight and brought in her cardboard boxes while she explains the delay and we call friends and relatives to inform them that she’s made it safe to Dallas.

As I help her with her boxes, time is somehow momentarily suspended. When she opens her boxes, yawns and tiredness magically disappear. She pulls out a lot of round cheeses, about 10, and jars of cajeta, a creamy caramel, and other sweets from her village, everything homemade, along with a very large plastic bag about to burst with dried red peppers. All this comes from Michoacán. Then come the bolillos or baguettes from Guadalajara and mugs for my new kitchen. She tells me sheepishly, “I wanted to bring you an entire set but one cost 1,800 pesos and another about 2,000 (roughly between 180 and 200 dollars). Can you believe it? So I just brought you these two mugs. They’re from Tonalá.”

It’s always like this when my aging mother returns from Mexico. Whether I like it or not, her boxes open the door to Mexico and my childhood: I can see the small village where my parents were born, the tile floor of my house, the streets of my barrio; I can smell the characteristic smog of my city, I can hear the deafening sound of the buses; I can peek at the steaming taco stand on the street corner. I remember some of the blurry faces of my many relatives.

With every cheese that I rinse for my mom (“to get rid of the excess drippings,” she tells me), I recover I-don’t-know-what essence that has become dusty and almost forgotten in my hectic everyday life in Dallas.

But the apex of my nostalgia, of its marvelous significance that is beyond words, occurs this time when she tells me that a woman reached her in Sahuayo to give her a pair of wings that my daughter had asked for as a birthday gift. I laugh when I explain to my husband that la Abuela could have made things easy on herself and just asked me to order them from the catalog where my daughter got the idea, instead of having to choose between bumblebee wings, or yellow, pink or white butterfly wings as she boards a bus, and then carry them tirelessly in her lap during the entire 27-hour trip that became longer because of two bus breakdowns in the middle of nowhere.

So that year my daughter got those Third World pink butterfly wings for her birthday.

From Mexico.

It seems to me that that is how it was meant to be.

#32 - My Aunt Olivia

It’s early morning, the cows have been milked, and beds have been made. Now, rosy-cheeked, my Aunt Olivia reigns from her small, dark, windowless kitchen. My cousin Cuca has returned from the mill where she took the corn or nixtamal to be made into masa, dough for the corn tortillas her mother will now make.

In the mud oven or fogón the firewood heats the round griddle, and it’s ready to receive the thin discs of uncooked masa where they will become tortillas, round and light, like magical globes lifted by hot air. Silently, one of my six cousins feeds the firewood so his mother can begin. The wood tortilla-press is big and heavy. From behind the metate, her grinding stone, Tía Olivia, expertly throws the hot tortillas into a basket lined by an impeccable white napkin, impeccably embroidered by her or her daughter. It’s from this old woven basket that we take the tortillas and we spread on them the milk’s skin just recently boiled and we sprinkle it with salt. If it’s not with milk’s skin, we eat the tortillas with cheese or cottage cheese, or a spicy salsa just made in the rock mortar or molcajete.

My sister Irma loves her ranitas. A ranita is a tortilla freshly pulled from the griddle and onto which Tía Olivia throws a few grains of coarse salt and drops of water. She rolls the tortilla with damp hands and squeezes it a couple of times. Hungrily, hurriedly, Irma takes the damp and steaming ranita and bites into it with obvious pleasure.

It’s a delicious ceremony. Tía Olivia smiles and watches us eat the tortillas that bloom from her busy hands. There is not much talking. And sometimes, when she takes a break to puff at her cigarette, she watches us from behind the smoke she exhales with an intense, quiet look that we’re too young to understand or appreciate fully. Still—though at an unconscious, wordless level—we know ourselves to be before some type of archetypal goddess, a goddess of inexhaustible resources and strength. We witness the exact moment of her mystery—her ability to transform matter into nurturing food. Dressed in black, always wrapped in her shawl, in that dark room with dirt floor and mud walls, where she is illuminated by the fire, we watch her, mother and aunt, perform this sacred daily ritual.

Beyond the narrow door the day expands always blue and luminous. Somewhere in the distance dogs bark, the radio plays Mexican folk music and children laugh, calling us to play. But we choose to stay here, to pay her tribute. We choose to grow strong and healthy by the apparent simplicity of her everyday miracle.